Could the State Department Have Prevented the Great Tumblr Outage of 2010?

Last night, Julian Assange and Co. posted a particularly revealing WikiLeaked diplomatic cable. The communiqué, commissioned and curated by the U.S. State Department, lists “all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security,” according to the BBC, which characterizes the note as the “most controversial” yet to emerge from the Cablegate document dump. Sites of mineral mines, communications facilities, oil pipelines, and chemical plants all appear on the list of sensitive locations. However, many areas of outsize political importance did not make the cut. Such sites that did not rank among the most important include Wasilla, Alaska, the San Francisco offices of Twitter, Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, and Mike Allen’s rented apartment Arlington, Virginia. The New York office of the blogging platform Tumblr were likewise left off the list, though perhaps it should not have been. Tumblr.com has been down for nearly a full business day, an absence that’s inspired panicked tweets and frantic questions from its fan base. Earlier this afternoon, a rumor circulated—perhaps on Twitter, whatever else is left of the Internet—that Tumblr had lost its entire archive. Tumblr president John Maloney dismissed this theory as “ridiculous.” If only Maloney could disseminate his message with an intuitive, free, and fun blogging service.